Trigger Finger

For Angel

1.

The typical
nightmare ends with the victim shooting bolt-upright in bed and trying to
orient himself to his surroundings as the dream he just escaped melts
away.
 
Mine didn’t end that like that.
 
I woke up but didn’t sit up;
au contraire
, I awoke in a prone
position and stayed that way, hollering at the top of my lungs, panicked but
motionless.
 
Whatever had happened in my
dream, I took it lying down.
 
So while I
may have been less than a lion in real life, in my nightmares I was a complete
pussy.

“Kevin!
 
Wake up!”

Allie, my
wife.
 
She shook me vigorously, either
trying to shake me awake or shake me to death so I would shut the hell up.
 
I opened my eyes and quickly catalogued
everything around me.
 
My bedroom, my
senses said.
 
A hand on my shoulder, not
a claw.
 
My wife, not the enemy.
 
My house.
 
I’d had a bad dream.
 
Nothing to
see here, nothing to look at, all’s well, sorry for the interruption, carry
on.
 

I stopped
yelling.
 
I lay still for a moment and
stared into the master bathroom before flipping over and pressing my face into
Allie’s chest.
 
Her warm skin smelled
like lavender.
 
She held me as my heart
rate returned to normal and confusion and terror yielded to understanding and
shame.
 

“Sorry,” I
mumbled.

“It’s okay,” she
said.
 

Silence.
 
Then:

“What was it
about?”

“You know,” I
replied.

I let her hold me
for a long time, because it felt good and she smelled good and I needed
pleasant things just then.
 
She made it
easier to resist the urge to remember my dream.
 
My mind likes to pick at scabs.
 
Left to its own devices, it wouldn’t rest until it made me unhappy
again.

“I think you need
to see somebody,” she said.
 

“I’m just nervous
about doing the show,” I replied, still talking to her chest.
 
I intended to keep my face there until she
forcibly evicted me.
 
“Stage fright.
 
It’ll pass.”

“This is more than
stage fright.” She pushed me back so she could look at me.
 
My recent behavior had dug deep lines of
concern into her face.
 
“You need help.”

“I need to drink
more and work less.”

“You should go see
Tom’s friend, the psychologist.
 
You
shouldn’t have to go through this.”

“I don’t need a
shrink,” I said, pulling away.

“Okay, Kevin,
I
need for you to see Tom’s psychologist
friend.
 
I
shouldn’t have to go through this.”

Tom Spicer, the
Spicer in Carwood, Allison, Spicer and York, P.A., held a certain amount of
influence over me.
 
I had practiced with
the firm for ten good years.
 
Maybe not
so good the last six months, but the nine and a half years before those had
earned me enough brownie points that my personality issues resulted in a
cautious referral to a shrink instead of a Go Work Somewhere Else meeting with
the equity partners.
 
Tom had given me a
business card and said:
Talk to this guy
right here.
 
You can trust him.

He had given me
the card two days ago.
 
I hadn’t called
the number on it yet.

“I don’t like
seeing you like this,” she said.
 
“It’s
not right.”

I snuggled back up
to her.
 
“I can handle it,” I said into
her chest.

“But I can’t.
 
I need this to be over.
 
We
need this to be over.
 
And it can’t be
over until this stops.
 
Not really.”

I inhaled her
scent.
 
The nightmare seemed far away
now, the mindless terror a distant memory.
 
My heart rate fell.
 
I remembered
Abby as a tiny baby, how Allie would hold her just like she was holding me and
how she would first stop fussing, then stop moving and then fall totally
asleep.
 
Maybe it was the smoothness of
her skin or the steady heartbeat beneath it; either way, Allie’s presence
reached a place inside me that nothing else could, an elemental control panel
where she could slow my heart or speed it up at will.

She kissed the
crown of my head.

“You’re still my
hero, you know,” she murmured.
 
“Getting
help isn’t going to change that.”

I was falling
asleep now.
 
“Mmmhmm.”

“You won.
 
You did it.
 
Now it’s time to clean everything up, okay?”

“Mmhmm.”

“So you’ll call
that number in the morning?”

“First thing,” I
mumbled.

She continued to
hold me until I fell out of the world again.
 
This time, I had no nightmares.

2.

In early February
of this year, I shot and killed two men in my home.
 
I call them “men” only because I understand
that I’m supposed to do that.
 
They had
two arms and two legs and walked upright and had opposable thumbs; everybody
else called them men.
 
Me?
 
I didn’t think two arms and two legs made
somebody a man any more than the absence of a carapace and antennae made him
not
a cockroach.
 

“Quit calling them
‘roaches,’ okay?”
 
Craig Montero, who had
become my coworker, then my friend and finally my attorney, had advised me of
this before I ever talked to the press.
 
“No ‘vermin,’ either, or ‘rats’ or ‘snakes’ or anything like that.
 
You’re an innocent homeowner forced to defend
his castle and his family.
 
You didn’t
want to kill these guys; you had to.
 
You
are deeply saddened and traumatized by what these
men
forced you to do.
 
Your
sympathy goes out to their families.”
 

“I am deeply
saddened and traumatized by what these men forced me to do,” I repeated in his
office, a carbon copy of my own.
 
“My
sympathy goes out to their families.”

“Don’t grin when
you say it.”

“Okay.”

“That’s fucked
up.
 
It makes
you
look fucked up.”

“Okay.”
 

“Heroes don’t
gloat.”
 

“Okay.”

“Dangerous
psychopaths gloat.
 
You’re not a
dangerous psychopath.”

“Okay,” I said yet
again.
 

And so I called
them “men” to the outside world even though I didn’t believe they
qualified.
 
They entered my home through
an unlocked door in my basement and found me asleep on my man-cave couch in
front of the Carolina-Virginia Tech basketball game.
 
They used my own softball bat to crack me
over the head in an attempt to kill me, then proceeded upstairs with a little
bag of goodies that included handcuffs, duct tape, rope, a knife, pretty much
anything that might be useful to you and a buddy if you’re looking to rape a
woman and her thirteen-year-old daughter.
 
But, contrary to the greater weight of the evidence—
see
Nazi Germany vs. Humanity
, (1933-1945),
The Rwandan
Genocide vs. Humanity
, (1994)—God existed.
 
He placed His hand between that bat and my skull.
 
I regained consciousness a few moments later,
woozy and terrified but otherwise okay.
 
I whipped my AK-47 out of my gun safe—tucked away in my man-cave—and
charged up to the ground floor, where I shot them both.
 
They never even found the stairs.
   

Anyway, I became a
killer that night out of necessity, and that sucked because I respected
life.
 
A divorce lawyer by trade, I had
never
intentionally
whacked anything
higher than a wasp.
 
In my mid-twenties,
I accidentally ran over a box turtle on one of the myriad back roads that
crisscross southern Alamance County,
North Carolina, and the
experience left me so riddled with guilt that I actually had to pull over and
do some deep breathing to deal with it.
 
I sat in my car on the side of the road and thought about how if I
hadn’t been screwing around with my CD player, I’d have seen the turtle and
could have avoided it.
 
I felt terrible
about it then—it sucks to kill anything, but it really sucks to kill something
cute—and I continued to feel bad about it long afterwards.
 
So much so that whenever I see a turtle
trying to cross the road now, I pull over and help.
 

But I never
experienced a shred of remorse for shooting the two dildos that broke into my
home.
 
You’d think that a civilized man,
an educated man, a family man like me would have felt
something
at having taken human life, no matter the necessity.
 
I’d seen documentaries where veterans of
various wars teared up in front of the camera over bayoneting this Nazi or
napalming that North Vietnamese, pick your former enemy.
 
These people had trained for it, yet they
cried on camera.
 
They needed counseling.

I had to have
Craig Montero tell me not to grin.
 

My brother Bobby
had an explanation for this.
 

“You’re a hard son
of a bitch,” he said to me over beers one time in the wake of the
shooting.
 
A Marine and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Bobby was a logical
choice for me to consult regarding my feelings about taking lives.
 
“I never thought I’d say that, but there you
go.
 
You’re a hard son of a bitch.”
 

I appreciated
that, because Bobby was a hard son of a bitch himself.
 
And now, instead of calling me a
chairborne commando
, a
REMF
(Rear-Echelon Mother Fucker) or
something more prosaic—like
pencil-pushing
pussy
—my brother called me a
hard son
of a bitch
.
 
I liked that.

“And because
you’re a hard son of a bitch, you don’t give a rat’s ass about these two
guys.
 
And think about it, dog; what were
these guys going to do to Allie and Abby?”

Dog
, instead of
man
or
dude
.
 
Another thing hard sons of bitches called other
men.

“Seriously, duct
tape and handcuffs?
 
After I found that
shit out, I’d have gone back over and killed them again.
 
Fuck them.
 
And fuck anybody who thinks you should feel bad about it—including
you.
 
Listen, did you rip yourself up that time you killed the copperhead in
the garage?”
 

There—I
had
intentionally killed.
 
Five years ago, Abby found a poisonous snake
coiled up beside her little pink bicycle in our garage, and I cut its head off
with a shovel.

“No,” I admitted.

But at the same
time, I didn’t say to Bobby then, I hadn’t felt
proud
of it, either.
 
There
existed now a dark truth I hadn’t related to anybody; when I thought about
pulling that trigger I felt not sorrow, remorse or disgust but
pride.
 
I sat in court, in my car, on the john and thought,
I’m awesome
.
 
With the
twitching of my trigger finger, I cleansed mankind.
 
I excised two bits of gangrene from the flesh
of my species.
 
A mediocre father,
husband and lawyer, I finally did something not only extraordinary, not only
courageous but
good
.
 
I made society a better place.
 
Whether that made me a psycho or not, that
was how I felt.
 
I wanted a parade.

So when I finally
walked into Dr. Robert Koenig’s office for the first time, I actually didn’t go
in there to discuss my feelings, to analyze my healing, to share my pain or
anything like that; I went to brag.
 
And
to maybe figure out why, when I felt nothing but pride over this, it still gave
me nightmares.

“So,” said Dr.
Koenig, “are you a gun enthusiast.”

Despite the
diplomas on the wall that marked him as a graduate of Emory University and the
University of Georgia, he asked the question in that instantly recognizable way
peculiar to those from Pennsylvania—the up-and-down of the sentence, the
absence of the expected interrogatory rise at the end.
 
Echoes, perhaps, of the German immigrants who
had settled the area where he grew up.
 
I
smiled at the inflection.
 
Allie had talked
like that once, as a freshman in college there at the beginning of the years in
North Carolina
that would gradually eradicate her Yankee accent.
 
When she got drunk or spent too much time
around her family, it would come out again.
 
Did you like the pot roast.
 
Did you run into a lot of traffic there on
95.

Are you a gun enthusiast.

I answered, “I am
now.”

A battered issue
of
Southern Rifleman,
the monthly
gospel of gun nuts everywhere,
rested
in my hands.
 
The magazine exerted a
calming effect on me; consequently, I hadn’t let go of it since coming in.
 
This probably made me look crazy here, which
was totally not my desired effect.
 
My
dark hair, thinning but still there, poked this way and that in a fashionable
mess that required a dab of gel and almost a whole minute of teasing to
perfect.
 
The suit I had worn today
remained hung on a body from which all unnecessary fat had melted over the
preceding months.
 
I had always been
handsome—hey, man, I can’t lie—and at thirty-six, the weight loss only enhanced
this.
 
I looked good, I thought.
 
Felt good, too.
 
Not at all like a man who should clutch a gun
magazine like some kind of redneck security blanket.

I forced myself to
lay it in my lap.
 
The coffee table that
stood between the Doc and I looked like a beaten refugee from a fraternity
house.
 
Scratches, cigarette burns and
drink rings marred a cheap veneer surface that ruined the chord of understated
luxury prevailing throughout the rest of the office.
 
The suede couch and chair and the mahogany
desk could have come from a showroom in New York
or London.
 
The conference table looked like
Craftique.
 
And among all this, here at
my knees sat the furniture droppings of a passing Wal-Mart.
 
I didn’t want my precious magazine—the trophy
I had received for my good deeds—on that damn thing.

The separation of
hand and
Southern Rifleman
lasted
exactly two seconds, and then I picked it up again.
 
I cleared my throat.

“Umm…I’m not a
subscriber.
 
Somebody told me about this,
so I went to Barnes & Noble and got one.
 
I thought maybe it’d be a good thing to show you.”

“Can I see it?”

He tacked a
question mark to the end of that one.
 
I
looked down at my magazine for a moment, then forced myself to hand it over.

“What am I looking
for?”

“Turn to the
back.
 
There’s this section called Heroes
of the Month, where they do these write-ups of everybody who bagged a home
invader since the last issue.
 
Back
page.
 
Mine’s the first paragraph.”

He opened the
magazine.
 
The pages sounded like dry
leaves as he turned them.
 
He was a thin
man, a marathon runner by appearance, with fingers almost as long and skinny as
his legs.
 
He wore jeans and a navy-blue
turtleneck sweater.
 
The narrow face and
bald head perched atop the shoulders recalled Steve Jobs, the departed icon of
Apple fame.
 
He even wore little rimless
glasses like Jobs and sported the same carefully-cultivated beard stubble.
 
They could have been twins.

He located the
story and adjusted the glasses on the bridge of his prominent nose.
 
I waited as he read.
 
When he finished, he closed the magazine and
handed it back to me.

I gripped it in
both hands again.
 
Realizing how crazy I
looked then, I blushed and forced myself to set it down.

“See, Doc, I’m not
just a Hero of the Month,” I said.
 
“I’m
a
double
Hero of the Month.
 
That’s what it says.
 
Listen, before I came in here, had you ever
heard of me?”

He nodded.

“Thought so.
 
Everybody in Burlington knows who I am now, because I’m a
double Hero of the Month.
 
I’m Kevin
Swanson.
 
I’m a bad son of a bitch, I’m a
hard
son of a bitch, I deserve a
frigging medal.
 
I’m on top of the
world.
 
My teenage daughter thinks I’m
cool again, and my wife respects me as a man again.
 
I have 1500 Facebook friends, up from 95 in
January.
 
I can tell you with complete
sincerity that my life has never been better.
 
Never.
 
That’s God’s honest
truth.
 
Yet here I am in a shrink’s
office.
 
Talking to you.”

He regarded me
silently, a skinny finger over his skinny lips.
 
He appeared deep in thought, as a psychologist in session should
appear—although, I realized, he could have been thinking about anything.
 
An upcoming oil change on the Mercedes,
perhaps, or whether he should get kale or spinach to go with the organic
free-range chicken tonight.
 
He looked
like an intelligent man, an intellectual man, but I learned a long time ago
that some people just looked thoughtful.